Public health care is like the public post-office...but...

[politicaladdict]

Vladimir Lenin once said "To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service."






Obama goes postal!

I copied this off heritage-foundation about how the post-office is, indeed, like public healthcare and Obama's speech saying this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XTi-WdOu2s&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.heritage.org%2F2009%2F08%2F11%2Fobamacare-the-post-office-of-health-care-plans%2F&feature=player_embedded

At his orchestrated townhall event today, President Obama defended the notion that his government-run public health care plan wouldn’t crowd out private insurers by referencing the symbiotic relationship between UPS, Fedex and the Post Office. Bad timing Mr. President. On Friday, the New York Times Business Section actually called for the privatization of the post office amid staggering losses, and even said it was in “General Motors territory.” So while the President sells you on his “post office” of health care plans, here are some questions to consider:

1.)  The U.S. Post Office is the only entity allowed by federal law to deliver first class mail to your mailbox. In fact, Fedex and UPS are strictly prohibited from delivering “non-urgent” letters. If the government can fairly compete and is setting fair rules, wouldn’t the post office be open to competition at your mailbox?

2.)  If Americans were offered “free” postage paid for by massive government spending and tax hikes, would Fedex and UPS still exist?

3.)  The Post Office is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion this year alone. How will a government-run health care plan manage taxpayer resources more efficiently?

4.)  Postmaster General John Potter says he lacks the “tools” necessary to run the Post Office effectively like a business.  Would a government-run health care system have the tools it needs to run as effectively as the private sector entities it is replacing?

5.) On the one hand, the President remarks how great his public health care plan will be. On the other hand, he notes it won’t be good enough to crowd out your private insurance, i.e. the Post Office comparison. So which is it Mr. President? Will it be so great that private insurance disappears or so awful that it isn’t worth creating in the first place?

6.)  But the most important question is this: if you have an urgent piece of mail you need delivered, life or death, who are you going to call? Everyone saying the government…please raise your hands. (crickets)

The most frightening line from Joe Nocera’s New York Times piece is this:  “As for Mr. Potter himself, while he may want more freedom to run the Postal Service like a real business, he, too, seemed surprisingly wedded to outmoded ideas about mail service in America. ‘This country needs to have and to protect universal service,’ he said.”

Protecting universal service at the expense of cost, innovation, and quality of care. Sound familiar?


Here's another link the Post-Office being run by the government.
http://mises.org/story/3646


That includes one of the reasons that the Post-Office would be dominant, especially with it's "only post-office can deliver high-class-mail" policy and it's taxing.

The only exception with private delivery programs is that they get by with delivering packages and not mail.

And internet access with e-mail being more common being an exception, aswell.

Ofcourse, the example of a loophole in public healthcare in Canada is that illegal-private clinics are popping up almost everywhere and challengeing the law, especially in Ontario.

[dead0man]

The Daily Show ripped into Obama for this last week (although with a slightly different angle of course).

[politicaladdict]

http://www.atr.org/want-health-care-run-like-post-a3701#

This is from the above link. And let's just pretend that mail is public health insurance and the public health care system is like, what Obama say, the Post-Office

President Obama recently defended his government run health care plan by equating it with the Post Office. He claims that the plan would not crowd out private companies just as the Post Office has not crowded out private competitors. He said:

    “How can a private company compete against the government? My answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining, meaning that taxpayers aren't subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services, and a good network of doctors, just like private insurers do, then I think private insurers should be able to compete.
    They do it all the time. If you think about it, UPS and Fed-Ex are doing just fine. It's the post office that's always having problems … there is nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace. As long as it is not set up where the government is being subsidized by the taxpayers so that even if they are providing a good deal, we keep having to pony up more and more money.” (Video)

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, wrote a fantastic article today at Mises.org. He explains how the Post Office has legal advantages that prevent competition from more efficient private companies, private companies had to struggle just to be allowed to compete, the Post Office doesn’t run like a private company, and that despite the advantages granted to the Post Office, it is still so poorly run, the private companies are able to out perform it.
 
The Post Office is subsidized with tax dollars and with legal favors. Rockwell writes, “Title 18 (I.83.1696) says that ‘Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets’ can be fined and jailed. Moreover, another law (39.I.6.606) says that any letter delivered by unlawful means can be seized and stolen by the government. It is immune from antitrust action and criminal liability.”
 
For private companies to even exist, they had to find a loophole by delivering packages and not mail. The Post Office had a complete monopoly on mail, until the internet was able to chip away at that monopoly by bypassing paper mail, with e-mail. This is one example of how free markets will innovate to find more efficient and cheaper ways to provide services.
 
Rockwell explains the fallacy that health care or the Post Office will “be self-sustaining, meaning that taxpayers aren't subsidizing it,” basically running like a private company. Rockwell writes, “f the goal is to get government to operate like a private service, what is the value added by having it provided by the government in the first place? The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all.”
 
Finally, Obama has shown us a perfect reason to not support the government option for health care. The private sector does everything better than the government and the Post Office is a prime example (public schools are another example, which is why Obama’s daughters go to private school). Even with the legal monopoly, tax subsidies, and special treatment, the Post Office is still an abysmal failure. It is on the GAO’s high risk list, $10.2 billion in dept, and has a cash shortfall of $1 billion.
 
This is the example that President Obama gives for what to expect from the government health care plan. A system that will be costly, slow, and impossible to eliminate once it is created. It will create burdens for the private sector and make laws to exclude them from some markets as we move closer to a single payer